Nearly six months after Microsoft purchased the Minecraft franchise in 2014 for $2.5 billion, the acquisition immediately proved to be a financial success for the software giant which saw a 79% increase in revenue from its first-party video games during the second quarter of its 2015 fiscal year compared to the prior year. At the time, Microsoft said that Minecraft sales contributed mainly to that boost. Today, the game continues to generate huge profits for the company, having already sold 150 million copies and commanding more than 91 million monthly active players, up from 74 million as of December 2017.
Minecraft is arguably one of the largest games of all time in terms of revenue, next only to Tetris. While some may wonder if Microsoft plans to release a sequel to the game on the back of its success, the question is out of the picture for the Redmond-based company. In a phone interview with Business Insider, Microsoft"s head for Minecraft Helen Chiang said:
"I really don’t think that makes sense for ‘Minecraft,’ given the community. It’s something that always fractures the community.”
That partly explains why Mojang, the team behind the game, recently announced a new expansion to the game called Minecraft: Dungeons instead of a whole new sequel. Unlike the original Minecraft, however, this new dungeon crawler game rids of the building aspect and gives more focus on adventure, according to Mojang creative lead Jens Bergentsen. Speaking to Business Insider, Bergentsen said:
"I would say that it’s a distilled version of ‘Minecraft’ in the sense that we wanted to focus on making sure that we made the dungeon crawler part as good as possible."
Over the long term, the team"s goal is to keep its community together without asking players to "move from Minecraft 1 to Minecraft 2", according to Chiang. To do that, Mojang hopes only to roll out more game expansions in the future instead of another Minecraft iteration.
Source: Business Insider